"For years, Nokia has been perceived as a company that is committed to enhancing of communications by offering affordable, accessible, functional and creative mobile phone devices and applications. However, while Nokia certainly maintains leadership in global market share of handsets, the brand has fallen behind where the most profitable sectors of the market have developed – most notably, smartphones. The brand was late in coming to market with a compelling product and it is in this new category that growth, relevance and emotional connection with the brand is built. Nokia was also caught unprepared for the follow-on explosion of apps and the OS they run on, making it difficult for the brand to build an effective ecosystem for its products. With these challenges and the weakening of the role of hardware over carriers, Nokia is seeing clear challenges ahead that may be hard to overcome in the short-term".